Jellyfish Robot Uncovers Secrets of Animal Movement

On their quest to build a better jellyfish robot, researchers have found that creatures across the animal kingdom — from moths to humpback whales — have a similar secret to moving through water and air: It’s all about the way they bend.

Jellyfish, despite their listless appearance as they float through the sea, are actually some of the most efficient creatures on the planet in terms of how much energy they spend to get where they need to go. On the opposite end of the efficiency spectrum are human-created machines, which require far more power to achieve similar motion. That’s why the U.S. Navy is working to build robots that move like jellyfish, which requires learning a lot about how exactly the jellyfish works.

“The amazing thing was when you try and build something you find out how little you know about the way it really works, in terms of biological organisms,” John Costello, a visiting scientist at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory, told weather.com.

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Costello, a biologist and jellyfish expert, is part of the team collaborating with the Navy. Some of the earlier examples of the robots were very stiff, moving rigidly through the water and requiring a lot of power. So a team at Virginia Tech added a flexible silicon cover, allowing it to move more like a real jellyfish.

“You put the thing in the water and it swam!” Costello said. “Like, hundreds to thousands of times faster, without adding any more power.”

Costello, along with a professor at Roger Williams University, worked with a group of undergraduate students to watch and catalog videos of 59 different animals as they moved through their environments. They found that whether they moved through air or water, all of the animals use propulsion systems that bend at the tip, like the curve at the edge of a whale’s tail or the shape of a bird’s wings. And the degree of bending stayed remarkably consistent across species — not too much, but just enough to provide flexibility.

The research is another example of a discipline known as biomimicry, in which engineers apply the lessons learned by nature over millions of years of evolution to improve human-made machines. Ultimately, learning more about how the animal kingdom moves can help people create machines that move better. (MORE: Eight Ways We've Copied Nature and Gained From It)

“If you’re interested in conserving energy during vehicle performance, animals are very useful models,” Costello said. “If our vehicles could function with their energetic efficiency, it could be a huge asset.”